U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Just when I was going to write a substantive post about a recent New Jersey Supreme Court opinion, the leading propagandist for the Fortune 500, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, came in and released a new report about online advertising by trial lawyers. Tort reform and lawyer marketing in one article? I can’t miss that. (An aside: don’t kid yourself that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce cares the slightest bit about small business. The Chamber is the most anti-free-market lobbying group in the country, an organization dedicated to ensuring the biggest corporations in the country stay that way, squashing small businesses and regular people alike.)

The “study,” technically done by the “Institute for Legal Reform,” is called The Plaintiffs’ Bar Goes Digital. I’m still unclear what the point of the research was, so I’ll just quote their press release:

The plaintiffs’ bar contributes to the commercialization of the legal profession by using a sophisticated and complex combination of paid search advertising and high organic search optimization of websites to generate site traffic – all with the goal of collecting the personal contact information of potential plaintiffs.

Plaintiffs’ firms are devoting millions of dollars to the creation and maintenance of websites, Facebook pages, Twitter handles, blogs and YouTube channels. By measuring Google advertising spends on 125 keywords during a 45-day period and then extrapolating to a 12-month period, we estimate firms will spend more than $50 million on Google keyword advertising alone. To put that in perspective, the Obama for America campaign – often held up as a pioneer in digital advertising – spent $16 million total in online advertising in 2008.

Initially, those numbers are due primarily to three outliers. The report says that Danziger & De Llano, The Lanier Law Firm, and Sokolove Law account for half of that $50 million. No surprise to see Sokolove there; he’s one of the pioneers of attorney advertising.

Let’s put those numbers into some real perspective. Last year the U.S. Chamber of Commence spent over $66 million lobbying representatives. In 2010, it was $132 million. In 2009, $144 million. Since 2006, they’ve spent far more money lobbying than any two other lobbying companies combined. Of course, a quick peek at those top 20 lobbying companies of the past decade shows many asbestos defendants, like General Electric or Northrop Grumman, also paying millions to lobbyists, too.

More perspective? Online healthcare and pharmaceutical marketing is over $1 billion a year. In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, BP was buying $3.59 million in AdWords related to the spill every month. Standard search engine marketing tools show that companies like Expedia and Amazon each spend $7-8 million annually on AdWords.

If the point of the study was to portray the plaintiffs’ bar as an unstoppable juggernaut beating up on poor little billion-dollar industries, I’m afraid they’ll need to go back to the drawing board. 
Continue Reading Chamber of Commerce Swings And Misses At Plaintiffs’ Lawyer Advertising